He had to employ authorised “safe-crackers” to open the safe. Also found were all the trappings of espionage, including bugging devices and telescopic cameras; and electric cattle-prods, suitable for crowd control or torture.

“You really despair when you have this kind of arsenal kept at the Iraq Embassy,” Dr al-Shaikhly said. As soon as the weapons were found he called in Scotland Yard and handed them over for investigation.

MI5, which is expected to be consulted by Scotland Yard over the discovery, used to monitor closely the comings and goings of the Saddam regime “diplomats” up until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, when diplomatic relations were severed. From then until the fall of Saddam in 2003, Baghdad was represented by an interests section in the Jordanian Embassy.

The previously elegant embassy building in Queen’s Gate, Kensington, has remained empty for years, and although thieves and vandals have trashed the interiors, the various safes on the floor above the ambassador’s office where the old regime intelligence service was based, had defeated the burglars.

Dr al-Shaikhly said that the discovery of the listening devices showed that the Saddam regime was paranoid about security. “I believe that they must have been bugging their own people inside the embassy. Such was the regime, they didn’t trust anybody. Everybody was spying on everybody else,” he told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.

A spokesman for the Iraqi Embassy said that the former Iraqi intelligence service used to plot against dissidents in Britain, and there had been several cases of assassinations or attempted assassinations. “Sometimes they would bring people in with false passports to do a job and then they would leave the country,” the official said.

Ballistic tests on the weapons could uncover whether any of the guns has criminal provenance. In July 1978 General Abdul Razak al-Naief, a former Iraqi Prime Minister living in exile from the Saddam regime, was assassinated in Mayfair by a gunman who was operating from the Iraqi Embassy. The hitman, Salam Hassan, was rugby-tackled by an ex-serviceman who had given chase, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment in March 1979.

Also in the 1970s there was an attempt on the life of Iyad Allawi, the first Prime Minister in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam, when he was living in London in exile; and in the 1980s there was an explosion inside the Iraqi Embassy, but the police were refused entry to investigate.

Scotland Yard said that the Iraqi Ambassador had cooperated fully with the British authorities and the arms included one Uzi sub-machinegun and a Kalashnikov.

Referring to the electric prod devices found in the safe, Dr al-Shaikhly said they looked like cattle prods. “They are the kind of things used in some countries for crowd control,” he said. The arms cache was found only when the new Iraqi Government in Baghdad decided to renovate the derelict embassy building. There were more than a dozen unopened safes but only one of them produced a surprise.

Although the Ambassador speculated that the weapons might have been used for training purposes, Iraqi officials said that the intelligence service personnel sent to London in the Saddam era were already fully trained for assassinating dissidents in exile.

Iraqi diplomats are expecting to return to their former premises next year.

UNDIPLOMATIC

• In 1984 gunmen fired shots from the Libyan People’s Bureau at demonstrators and killed PC Yvonne Fletcher
  
  
• Ammunition and a detonator were found at the Iraqi Embassy in 1991 after it was ransacked by Kurdish protesters
  
  
• A Vietnamese diplomat was expelled in 1988 after he brandished a handgun outside his embassy in London

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